26 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. L 



contractile masses of albumin ("Eiweiss"), perfectly 

 homogeneous; 14 examples of these were announced to 

 exist under the names "Protaniceba" and "Protogenes," 

 denoting forms of life which Haeckel claimed to have 

 discovered, but which have never been found again by 

 any other naturalist. These organisms, as described by 

 Haeckel, were by no means such as the modern micro- 

 scopist would call minute; on the contrary, they were 

 relatively large, and some of the forms added to the 

 Monera by Haeckel 's contemporaries might even be 

 termed gigantic, as, for example, the supposed organism 

 Bathybius, discovered in the bottles of the Challenger 

 Expedition, which was believed to cover large areas of 

 the floor of the ocean with a layer of primordial proto- 

 plasm, but which proved finally to be a precipitation by 

 alcohol of the gypsum in sea-water. 



The theory of plasson and of the cytodes of Haeckel 

 may be considered first from the purely speculative stand- 

 point of the origin of the living substance, a problem with 

 which I wish to become entangled here as little as pos- 

 sible, since it is my object to confine myself so far as 

 possible to deductions and conclusions that may be drawn 

 from known facts and concrete data of observation and 

 experiment. If, however, we postulate a chemical evolu- 

 tion of protoplasm, and believe that every degree of com- 

 plexity exists, or at least has existed, between the simplest 

 inorganic compounds and the immensely complicated 

 protein-molecules of which the living substance is com- 

 posed, then no doubt chemical compounds may have ex- 

 isted which in some sense were intermediate in their 

 properties between the two constituents, cytoplasm and 

 chromatin, found in all known samples of the living sub- 

 stance of organisms. In this sense and on such a hypoth- 

 esis, a substance of the nature of plasson may perhaps be 

 recognized or postulated at some future time by the bio- 

 chemist, but this is a subject which I am quite incompe- 

 tent to discuss. To the modern biologist, who can deal 



14 See Ms "Prinzipien tfer generellen Morphologie, ' ' Berlin, 1906, p. 61. 



